Industry News

Having closed its fiscal year in June, the family-owned Sennheiser Group has announced its financial results for 2019, and while sales were only slightly down overall for the year, the company is preparing for the worst. Citing the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on its consumer and professional businesses, as well as a slowdown in the headphone market, Sennheiser will cut roughly 650 employees by the end of 2022, with about 300 of those jobs in Germany.

Daniel Sennheiser, co-CEO of Sennheiser, noted in a statement, “In order to position the company for a successful future, we will adapt our organizational structure to the changing conditions and align it with the new requirements.” As a result, the company will be looking to make cuts in corporate functions such as supply chain and operations. Aiming to enact the reduction in what it termed a “socially responsible manner,” Sennheiser will consider measures such as not filling open positions, a voluntary redundancy scheme and severance options in addition to offering partial and early retirement.

“We are a family-owned company and every single one of our employees is part of the team,” said Dr. Andreas Sennheiser, co-CEO. “Together we share a passion for audio. With this in mind, these have been very difficult decisions to make and it is important to us primarily to avoid redundancies and to find individual solutions together with employees.” He added, “We will continue to focus on our core competencies and further strengthen both our consumer and professional divisions by transferring operational responsibility completely to these two business areas.”

Sennheiser’s fiscal year 2019 saw the company grow in its professional division while it landed below expectations in the consumer business. In total, the Sennheiser Group generated turnover of $863 million — 6.5% more than in 2018.

The company attributed much of its slide on the consumer side to the global headphone market, which has declined by 30 to 40% in recent months, largely due to physical retail outlets worldwide being closed or operated under shortened hours. Accordingly, sales of Sennheiser headphones also decreased to the same extent. In order to mitigate those effects, in March, the company introduced cost reductions and reduced working hours in Germany. Measures to reduce personnel costs and material costs were implemented to the same extent at Sennheiser’s international locations.

The effect of COVID-19 has also been felt in the company’s live sound microphone sales, as Daniel Sennheiser explained: “With the cancellation of live events all over the world, the entire event and music industry has been practically brought to a standstill and is only slowly getting back on track. The future of many rental companies, and other service providers is under threat. This is having a significant impact on sales of microphones, which will continue to be reflected in our business performance next year. Exceptions are studio microphones.”

In the fiscal year 2019, the professional division generated turnover of $414.4 million, an increase of 9.2% over the previous year. Growth was driven in particular by the product categories of live music, studio recording and business communication. The consumer division generated turnover of $448.7 million. Although turnover increased by 4.1%, that landed below the growth of the headphone market as a whole, despite the launch of new headphone models in the premium segment.

Playing to a hometown crowd continued to be Sennheiser’s forte when it came to sales — EMEA continued to be the region with the highest turnover in 2019 with $436.4 million, garnering an increase of 6.4%. In its home market Germany, Sennheiser was able to increase turnover by 1.8%. The APAC region recorded the highest increase in percentage terms with 10.6%. Growth was driven in particular by the markets in China, Japan and South Korea, while in the Americas region, turnover increased by $7.2 million, or 3.3%, year on year to $226.6 million.

With imminent job cuts and an expected continued downturn ahead, Sennheiser added that it fully intends to keep funding its R&D efforts going forward, including the development of its AMEBO immersive audio technology. “To create innovative audio experiences for our customers and to shape the future of the audio industry, we are continuously investing in our development activities, “ said Dr. Andreas Sennheiser. Sennheiser Group’s investments in 2019 increased by 4.1% to $71.8 million, which corresponds to 8.3% of turnover.

The post Sennheiser Announces Layoffs Amidst Slowing Market appeared first on Radio World.

Inovonics has published a comparison chart to help its users figure out which AARON receiver to buy. (A link is provided below.) We asked Sales & Marketing Manager Gary Luhrman about it.

Radio World: For those not familiar, briefly what is the AARON series?

Gary Luhrman: The AARON series is a family of three FM and FM/HD Radio rebroadcast translator receivers built to handle the most challenging reception scenarios. Boasting sensitivity and selectivity superior to even the most elite professional or consumer receivers, the AARONs combine premium features with unparalleled receiver performance.

Starting with a unique Software Defined Radio (SDR) front-end that provides extraordinary sensitivity, selectivity and RF shielding, each model adds additional functionality designed to meet unique needs according to the broadcaster’s application. The AARON products also provide remote access and valuable monitoring feedback via an intuitive web interface that is accessible from any web-enabled device (smart phone, tablet or PC). Engineers can listen via an audio stream and receive notifications via email or SMS messages for audio loss, low signal, RDS error, pilot loss, and audio failover back-up.

RW: Who came up with the idea for the series? 

Luhrman: Inovonics had made re-broadcast receivers for years but we were being asked for more features, better sensitivity and selectivity than our traditional analog designs could offer. That’s when we took a second look and decided to totally do a redesign from the ground up.

RW: How is Aaron different from other products in its class, what sets it apart?

Luhrman: The selectivity and sensitivity of the receiver make the AARON a strong contender to be Number 1 in its class. The straightforward setup and intuitive management from the web interface make the AARON easy to work with, and additional built-in tools at your disposal, such as RDS encoder, composite pass-through and MPX regeneration modes, along with failover audio back-up features. Finally, Inovonics’ three-year factory warranty and Premiere After Sales Service helps to “seal the deal” when engineers are looking for a reliable rebroadcast receiver.

RW: We’ll share a link to your chart below. But give a quick summary of how these three models differ.

Luhrman: The AARON 650 is our most popular FM Rebroadcast Receiver due to its flexibility to handle most scenarios.

For starters it has the sensitive and selective digital FM receiver referred to earlier along with Composite Pass-through and baseband regeneration modes, which are valuable tools when the FM reception is very challenging and the signal needs cleaning-up before passing it on to the FM transmitter.

The 650 also has a built-in RDS encoder, which allows you to alter or modify the RDS message to the translator. The 650 has two Antenna inputs and two MPX outputs along with some audio back-up capabilities via Web-stream or SD-Card. Finally, the interactive Web interface allows remote listening via Web-stream, FFT Analyzer, Alarms/Notifications, and supports SNMP.

The AARON 640 is the “no frills” model with the same digital SDR front-end for great FM reception, Composite Pass-through, and Active Reception Processing for bandwidth, stereo blend, HF blending and more. And of course it has the interactive web interface with remote listening via web stream, Alarms/notifications and SNMP support.

The AARON 655 FM/HD Rebroadcast Receiver is almost in its own category. It was designed to accept FM and HD Radio 1-8 program sources for rebroadcast, as well as analog, AES-digital and streaming inputs with fallback-priority selection.

You can think of the 655 as three products built into a single 1U box. It has the sensitive FM/HD Radio SDR-based receiver; a complete three-band audio processor with stereo generator; and a dynamic RDS encoder.

Some of the unique features of the 655 include creating a dynamic RDS message by converting the Pad Data from HD Radio channel or Streamed audio. The built-in audio processor allows the broadcaster to provide the best possible audio signal to the FM translator, and the 655 has input options for Analog, AES-digital, and Streaming audio.

RW: What are the retail price points?

Luhrman: Here are our list prices for the AARON rebroadcast receivers; I urge broadcasters to contact their preferred Inovonics dealer for a competitive quote that may be more attractive than the prices you see here:

• AARON 640 FM Rebroadcast Receiver = $2,100
• AARON 650 FM Rebroadcast Receiver = $2,390
• AARON 655 FM/HD Radio Rebroadcast Receiver = $2,600

RW: What else should we know?

Luhrman: All Inovonics products are designed, manufactured and assembled at our factory in Felton, Calif. USA. They come with a three -year factory warranty and Premiere After Sales Service. We can be reached for any questions at www.inovonicsbroadcast.com.

Link to the Inovonics AARON Comparison Chart (PDF).

The post How to Pick the Right Inovonics AARON Receiver appeared first on Radio World.

Digital Radio Mondiale is welcoming a policy statement from the government of South Africa about digital radio.

“This is a momentous decision for South Africa [and] the African continent and represents a first for digital audio broadcasting anywhere, as it brings together in one policy the two ITU-recommended open digital radio standards, DRM and DAB+,” DRM wrote in an email from Chairman Ruxandra Obreja.

DRM was reacting to a directive from Stella Tembisa Ndabeni-Abrahams, minister of communications and digital technologies, regarding the introduction of digital sound broadcasting in South Africa. It recommends both DRM, for AM and FM bands, as well as DAB+.

“The directive is based on the regulatory South African acts, the ITU Radio Regulations of 2016, the Southern African Development Community band plans and the Broadcasting Digital Migration Policy,” DRM wrote in a summary.

“Its aim is to provide a licensing framework and optimum allocation of radio frequencies for the South African three-tier system of public, commercial and community broadcasting services.” The goal is to stimulate local industry in the manufacturing of digital receivers and encourage investment in broadcasting.

“This is both a positive sign and strong encouragement to the broadcasting sector to attain the goals of universal service and access to all,” DRM continued.

“With this pragmatic and pioneering recommendation, the South African citizens will be free to consume an ingenious and complete digital platform through which they can access education, achieve social change and attain economic empowerment.”

The statement directs the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa to “determine priorities for the establishment of digital broadcasting networks and services in the frequency bands allocated for these services, to introduce DSB services alongside the existing analog services.” The authority is to “encourage market availability and use of multi-standard receivers to allow for the continued use of analog FM alongside DAB and DRM.”

The recommendations are Digital Radio Mondiale to complement analog AM service in the medium-wave band (535.5–1606.5 kHz) and analog FM services in VHF band-II (87.5–108 MHz); and to be deployed in the allocated VHF band-III (214–230 MHz). DAB+ transmissions would complement those in the allocated VHF band-III (214–230 MHz).

The post DRM Welcomes South Africa Digital Policy Statement appeared first on Radio World.

The Arkansas Broadcasters Association is the latest to cancel an annual conference due to the ongoing effects of the pandemic in the United States.

“In the interest of addressing the health and safety concerns of our members and partners, we have decided not to move forward with ARKCON 2020,” Executive Director Luke Story wrote in an email to members.

“This was not an easy decision. Fortunately, we did not have to make this decision alone, and are grateful to our members and partners for helping us through the difficult process.”

The organization will host a virtual sales and management media summit on July 22 and 23; it will be free to ABA members.

As we reported earlier, the Wisconsin Broadcasters Association recently made a similar decision about its annual Broadcasters Clinic. And September’s fall Radio Show had been cancelled earlier by the National Association of Broadcasters and Radio Advertising Bureau.

The post Arkansas Broadcasters Won’t Meet in Person appeared first on Radio World.

Broadcast business software developer Marketron has announced a new ebook and series of free webinars.

The ebook is titled “Digital Transformation Playbook: A Play-by-Play Guide for Broadcasters to Grow Digital Advertising Revenue.”

The upcoming webinar series is called “Radio’s Digital Transformation” and the individual events are:

• July 15 — Develop a Vision and Prepare for Change;
• Aug. 6 — Designing Your Digital Product Suite;
• Aug. 26 — The Importance of Workflow and Processes;
• Sept. 16 — Creating Your Digital Organizational Structure;
• Oct. 7 — Launch Your Digital Game Plan;
• Oct. 28 — Tracking Performance and Removing Roadblocks.

Marketron CEO Jim Howard said in the announcement that in terms of product value, “radio has always been hard to beat as an advertising medium” but that broadcasters are recognizing the potential of digital advertising to drive growth.

The post Marketron Makes Broadcast Business Software Ebook Available appeared first on Radio World.

Those owning or considering purchasing Digital Audio Denmark or NTP Technologies converters/routers may wish to know about a newly released trio of controllers, the Penta 615 series.

These rackmounted boxes are compatible with Digital Audio Denmark (DAD AX32 and DX32R) and NTP Technology (Penta 720/721) routing products.

[Check Out More Products at Radio World’s Products Section]

The pushbuttons are programmable. The color displayed when active is also programmable. The OLED display above each key is also programmable.

The 615-610A adds rotary encoders for volume control. The 2RU 615-620A has a display.

The group can be powered over Ethernet or by an adaptor.

Info: www.ntp.dk

The post NTP Provides Control appeared first on Radio World.

The radio news business in the United States will take a big blow when Westwood One ceases its news operations next month.

WWO is the national-facing arm of Cumulus Media. It has more than 900 affiliated stations for its news products.

The company declined to make public the number of employees affected by this closure, citing company policy. According to media reports, affiliates got the news last week.

Westwood One News launched in 2015; and two years ago the company was hailing the news operation as “the Edward R. Murrow Award-winning, highly-regarded full-service news division of the largest radio network in the U.S.” At that time it said its affiliates reached more than 25.7 million people, based on Nielsen Audio data; since then its reported number of affiliates has grown.

Now the news operation is set to shutter at the end of next month.

“Given the current necessity to make critical decisions about the deployment of resources, we made the decision to cease WWO news operations on Aug. 30,” a spokeswoman confirmed in a statement.

“We extend our heartfelt thanks to the entire WWO News Team for all that they have accomplished and acknowledge the exceptional leadership of Bart Tessler, who has commanded our admiration and respect throughout his 45-year news career.”

The company said it remains “heavily committed” to its personality driven news/talk programming with brands like Mark Levin, Ben Shapiro, Jim Bohannon and Michael Savage.

Related: “Westwood One Slams NYC-Based Ad Buying Assumptions”]

The post Westwood One Will Close Its News Operation on Aug. 30 appeared first on Radio World.

Don’t give the people who win your on-air contests a reason to call the FCC.

That’s the takeaway from two cases in Texas in which broadcasters have ended up facing possible fines.

On-air contests have long been one of radio’s most engaging and entertaining activities. But there are strict rules around running them. Failure to hold up your end of a contest can bring action from the Federal Communications Commission.

Townsquare Media of El Paso Inc. allegedly violated those rules when KSII(FM) failed to timely award a contest prize.

The commission said it got a listener complaint that KSII had failed to award a prize of Elton John tickets in late 2016. The winner said a station employee took his information, informed him that the tickets were not yet available and instructed him to call back after the new year. The listener called in January and February but was told the tickets still were not available.

Townsquare blamed the problem on a breakdown in communications and procedure, saying there was no intent to defraud or deceive. It eventually followed up and provided tickets to a different Elton John concert in Las Vegas, with airfare and hotel.

But the FCC says precedent is clear that “neither the improper actions of a licensee’s employees nor subsequent remedial actions undertaken by a licensee can excuse or nullify a licensee’s rule violation.” It plans a $6,000 forfeiture. This is higher than the base fine of $4,000 because of the trouble the listener had to go through and because of another past fine against Townsquare, though it’s nowhere near the upper limits in contest cases of about $50,000 per violation or even $500,000 for a single act.

In a separate case, contest rules tripped up Gow Media, licensee of sports station KFNC(FM) in Mont Belvieu, Texas. The FCC said KFNC failed to award a prize to the winner of a Fantasy Football contest in 2016. The listener said that the prize was an all-expenses-paid vacation to Marival Resort in Mexico, but that he he never received it “despite many calls, emails and messages.”

Gow Media said the operator of the resort had reneged on its commitment and that the station eventually offered the listener $3,600 in cash, which it said is twice the value of the prize. The listener accepted this, signed a Settlement Agreement and indicated that he would like to rescind his complaint.

But the deed was done. Although Gow Media later took steps to resolve the issue, this was only after the FCC began its investigation, the commission said, adding that Gow did not explain why it took so long to respond to the listener nor why the matter remained unresolved for two years. It also pointed out that KFNC’s contest rules limit the time period to claim a prize to 30 business days. “Timely fulfillment of the prize … was a material term of the licensee’s own contest rules.”

In this case the proposed penalty is $5,200. In both cases, the broadcasters have a window of time to pay the forfeitures or file a written statement seeking to overturn them.

The post Contest Missteps Slip Up Two Texas Stations appeared first on Radio World.

Ilker Akin has joined transmitter manufacturer Nautel.

He will be regional sales manager for Europe, Israel and Russia and be based in Germany.

Akin has been in technical management and marketing with several German and Turkish companies, many of which are involved in broadcast system installation and equipment sales.

The post Nautel Adds Akin appeared first on Radio World.

If you’re looking for an FM opportunity, here’s a heads up: The Federal Communications Commission has reinstated 14 vacant allotments in four states and one U.S. territory.

This is the result of some bureaucratic changes over the years.

At one time the commission’s table listed all vacant FM allotments as well as channels and communities occupied by authorized facilities. In 2006, it removed allotments of authorized and awarded FM facilities to accommodate new application procedures for stations to change their communities of license. And now when an authorization is cancelled, the vacant FM channel is supposed to be reinstated in the FM Table, to be protected for spacing purposes and preserve the opportunity to license a future station in that community.

The 14 allotments being reinstated by the Audio Division of the Media Bureau had been removed from the table because a construction permit or license was granted; but they are vacant now because of the subsequent cancellation of the authorizations or dismissal of long-form auction applications.

So the commission is reinstating them. In future it said it plans periodically to update the FM Table to reinstate such allotments when this situation arises again.

The allotments in this case have already undergone notice and comment rule making, so the staff said there’s no need for further notice and comment.

The list of reinstated vacant allotments is below. Most are in California, Texas and Colorado. But depending on your idea of heaven, there are single allotments in the Virgin Islands and Iowa.

The Audio Division adds that its engineering analysis confirms that these vacant allotments meet minimum distance separation requirements. But it added that to prevent short-spacing, it adopted new site restrictions for Channels 261B at Coalinga, Calif., and 278C2 at Hereford, Texas. “Both are considered fully spaced allotments notwithstanding the subsequent grant of authorization to several stations that are providing contour protection to these allotments” under FCC rules. Also, Channels 261B at Coalinga, Calif., 271A at Ford City, Calif., and *275A at Charlotte Amalie, Virgin Islands are considered fully spaced allotments as well.

Community      Channel Added

Avenal, California — 269A

Coalinga, California — 261B

Dos Palos, California — 240A

Firebaugh, California — 234A

Ford City, California — 271A

King City, California — 275A

Lindsay, California — 277B1

Calhan, Colorado — 284C3

Idalia, Colorado — 231A

Asbury, Iowa — *254A (*238A was deleted)

Ganado, Texas — 235C1

Hereford, Texas — 278C2

Palacios, Texas — 259C1

Charlotte Amalie, Virgin Islands — *275A

(Channels with an asterisk may be used only by noncommercial educational broadcast stations. Learn about the FM Table of Allotments here.)

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